I will begin running two different games of Rifts soon, so I have been thinking about ways to adjust the Palladium System which is particularly unfriendly to the play-by-format on sites like RPOL. The goal is to make the resolution of actions quicker and easier without houseruling the game to where it becomes unrecognizable. Rewriting the game rules in their entirety is NOT the goal. If it doesn't make actual gameplay run more smoothly, it does not make its way into this thread.

I will consider any suggestions.

#1 The Honor System. Screw integrated dice rollers and verified online random number generators. I would rather just take your word for it.

#2 Declarations. All actions for the entire melee round will be declared at the same time. If a player-character has five attacks tell me right away what you are doing with each of the five. Only after all of the actions are declared will any of them be resolved. The player will also provide all of the dice rolls required to perform these actions when the actions are declared. Conditional instructions are allowed and encouraged. For example: El Disgusto is roleplaying Sir Humpsalot who has four attacks. El Disgusto specifies that Sir Humpsalot will draw his sword and strike three times with it -- but if Sir Humpsalot suffers more than ten points of damage, he will switch to defense and dodge until the end of the round. The purpose of this house rule is to cut down on the need to make separate posts describing every action.

#3 Damage: Damage is typically rolled in Palladium games. That is one extra post in a play-by-post game which has to be made after the player learns that her character has landed a blow. Damage is standardized now, like how it works in Numenera RPG. An attack does exactly half of its maximum possible normal damage. If a weapon inflicts 3D6 normally, it does 9 points in my game. Critical hits still double the damage inflicted, and Roll with Impact dice rolls still half the damage when successful. In particularly dramatic scenes, I might declare that all damage performed is the maximum on the damage dice. The purpose of this rule is to eliminate an extra dice roll and also avoid that awkward situation in which a player finally lands a critical but then rolls a natural 1 on damage resulting is a lousy 2 points of damage from a crit.

#4 Saving Throws: Palladium has only a handful of common saving throws, but there are dozens of them for various situations with mostly arbitrary values. In my system, there are three values for any saving throw scenario. They are 10 (easy), 15 (moderate), and 19 (difficult). Bonuses to saving throw still apply, but they are considered a bonus to die roll instead of a modification to the target number. The purpose of this rule to prevent me from needing to pick up the book and flip through it looking for that darn Saving Throw number again.
This message was last edited by the player at 06:03, Fri 10 Oct 2014.

Here are some ideas on which I am waffling. For one, I would like to combine the various types of energy pools that characters keep on their character sheets. ISP, PPE, and Chi all need to be one stat -- energy. I see no reason for three stats. I tried combining these for a table-top game a couple of years back, and I felt it worked well. If a character uses more than one type, like a Chi Mage (Mystic China) or a Mystic (Rifts), that character would use whichever pool is larger. Another advantage is I don't have to try to explain why a Psychic does not use Psychic Potential Energy. This is the sort of thing I would like to institute as a house rule, but I am resisting because it does not specifically help the games run smoother on a play-by-post medium. Opinions? Rants? Flames?